Two performance tweaks to boost your Vista performance

I have a HP dv6000 laptop with Vista Home Premium. Since day 1, my machine was terribly slow for no reason. I tried so many tweaks that didn't seem to work at all. I installed Process Explorer from sysinternals tools to monitor which process is taking much resources. There were two things that gave me a good performance boost:

1. Disable Windows defender.
   
2. Disable the windows indexing service.

I have my own anti-virus software (Avira) which provides protection against much better protection than the Windows defender. But because both the defender and Avira were scanning each file and process, it effectively doubled amount of load to protect the system. So I disabled the defender. You can read how to turn off the defender here.

I don't need the indexing service offered by Windows. The indexer hogs so much resource and I have not used the search feature much. You can easily disable indexing by right clicking on the drive in Windows Explorer and un-checking the indexing for that drive. Make sure that change is applied on the drive and all the files and directories under that drive. You can read more about this here.



Another worthy exercise is to launch msconfig and inspect all the programs that are started during start up. You can read more about how to do this here.

If you still experience slow down, launch the Process Explorer and inspect which process is taking more CPU. You can press space bar and pause screen refresh and inspect all the processes that are running.

Everything you want to know about memory

Recently I have been looking around to upgrade the memory in my laptop. I was trying to understand what are the specs and how to find out the right RAM model for my laptop.

I found this article to be extremely useful. You can also read a follow up article that talks about the details of the RAMs used in GPUs.


Also this article was helpful in understanding the FSB speeds and bus speeds in general.

Reloading inittab without reboot

Use "/sbin/init q" if you made any changes to the inittab file and would like init to reload that file.

A note on Java's Calendar set() method

Remember that the Calendar's internal fields include year, month, date, hour, minutes, seconds, milliseconds and time zone. Whenever you are calling a set() method with multiple fields, like set(year, month, date), it will not affect the rest of the fields.

Remember that there is no set() method with multiple fields available to set the milliseconds. If you would like to set the milliseconds, you must use set(Calendar.MILLISECOND, value). Likewise, if you are planning to set all the fields, its a good idea to reset all the fields using clear() method. This will clear milliseconds as well.

Most of the times, millisecond field may not be of interest to you. But if you are going to use the UTC milliseconds, by calling getTimeInMillis(), then make sure you set the right values for milliseconds as well.

Netcat for windows

I was troubleshooting an issue with one of the clients. And I desperately needed them to run the netcat tool and send me the output. But their OS is windows. So I was looking for the netcat tool for windows. Here it is: http://joncraton.org/files/nc111nt.zip

Eclipse - issue with setting break points

I recently ran into a weird issue. I had to debug a piece of code that I wrote. So I launched the application in Eclipse in debug mode, and set a few break points. Though I can see that the log messages related to all the break points appear in the log, it didn't stop in all the break points. In some break points it stopped and in some other it didn't stop. I checked the output directory, I checked the flags to the compiler, even I downgraded to Ganymede. Nothing seemed to work.

When I asked the question in the stackoverflow.com, I got the answer in five minutes. Looks like JDK 1.6 update 14 has an issue with debugging. So upgrading to JDK 1.6 update 16 helped. But still I am seeing the issue occasionally.

CircuitCity online is open for business again

CircuitCity online is open for business again. They filed for bankruptcy in Nov 2008 and closed both online and stores.

Comparison of SSD and drum-based HD (HDD)

I am in the process of assembling a PC for my friend. So I was gathering information on various components. I thought I must share what I learned about hard disks.

The latest breed of hard disks in the PC segment are called Solid State Disks (SSD). Though the technology is not new, the price has become affordable in the recent few years. Due to their formidable high prices earlier, computers were usually shipped with the drum-based hard disks (I will refer to them as simply HDD). You can read about SSDs from wikipedia.

These are the points I wanted to share:
1) The transfer speed of SSD is faster compared to HDD. A good 7200 RPM hard disk usually has a transfer rate around 70 MBytes/sec. Where as SSD has a transfer speed around 200 MBytes/sec. Remember I am giving an approximate figure and speeds vary for read and write. One of the recent additions to the hard disks is 10000 RPM hard disks. I found them to be faster than SSD. For e.g. Western Digital's Velociraptor has a peak transfer speed of 384 MBytes/Sec.

2) The life time of SSD is very good. The Mean Time Between Failure for an SSD is in millions of hours. For e.g. OCZ's 60 GB SSD is having an MTBF of 1.5 million hours. So SSDs are more robust.

3) The shock tolerance of the SSD is substantially higher. For e.g. OCZ's 60 GB SSD's max shock resistance is 1500G. But for Velociraptor, the same value is 300G.

4) The SSDs make less noise compared to HDD as there is no mechanical parts.

5) One of the cons of the SSDs is the price per bit of SSD is still substantially higher. For e.g. a OCZ's 60 GB hard disk costs $219, where as the Velociraptor 300 GB costs $229.

Whats my advice? If you are serious about the life of the hard disk, try SSD. If you are crazy about the speed, try Velociraptor.

What have I decided? I have decided to buy the SSD and to add an external hard disk with eSATA interface. I have decided to buy Iomega Prestige 1TB.

Ubuntu from USB drive

I wanted to try out running Ubuntu from my USB drive (2GB). While I was searching for the right software, I came across UNetbootin utility. This utility is a lot simpler to use than the method provided in the Ubuntu site, a method that makes use of Win32 disk imager. The best part is, UNetbootin provides you options to create bootables from other operating systems like FreeBSD, NetBSD and other notable flavors of Linux.

UNetbootin is not an installable, its just one .exe file. You download the exe file and start it. It will prompt you for the version of OS you would like to burn in your USB. Once you select, it will automatically download the ISO image file and burn it for you. In case you happen to have the ISO image file available on your local hard drive, you can provide that path too.

Eclipse icons

Here is a complete list of icons that are used in Eclipse. It is very useful to understand all these icons as most of the time in the outline views only the icons are used to crisply denote what each member/method stands for.

Good JavaScript frameworks

This page provides you a list of top 5 JavaScript frameworks. Though I am not sure if they are the top 5, which is always arguable, I am very sure that those frameworks are good and useful.

VirtualBox 3.0 freezes bug has been fixed

If you had been following my blog, I posted an issue earlier with VirtualBox 3.0 that under network load it freezes. That bug has been fixed in release 3.0.2. Please refer to the release notes of 3.0.2 for an update. I verified the fix by reinstalling the 3.0.2 version.